Many software applications assume that their rendered content will be displayed on a display with Standard RGB (sRGB) color space gamut and luminance response. When this assumption fails (e.g., due to a wide gamut display or a display calibrated to the DICOM grayscale display function), the colors and/or luminance of display content rendered on the display for the application may appear incorrect.
Some applications are capable of using ICC profiles for an attached display so that, when rendered, the application appears as expected. However, many existing applications do not support the use of ICC profiles for output devices. Users of these “non-ICC-aware” applications do not have a means of adjusting the rendered content for the application so that it is properly rendered on the display.
This problem is compounded by the fact that users may need to work simultaneously with multiple non-ICC-aware applications that each expect a different display behaviour.
Use of ICC profiles by ICC-aware applications can be computationally expensive, in particular for those ICC profiles providing large 3D color lookup tables (CLUTs). In fact, central processing units (CPUs) are often not able to process rendered frames for ICC-aware applications with ICC profiles fast enough to keep up with animated or moving images.